{"id":5184,"date":"2017-03-28T08:25:46","date_gmt":"2017-03-28T13:25:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5184"},"modified":"2017-03-28T08:25:46","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T13:25:46","slug":"philosophy15-on-swamping-and-spitballing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5184","title":{"rendered":"Philosophy15 on Swamping and Spitballing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Philosophy15 Episode 18:  Swamping and Spitballing\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-_5lcxSFb4o?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A new episode at Philosophy15 is up, and in it Talisse and I talk through the related phenomena of what we&#8217;d been calling in our old 3QD piece, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2016\/06\/spitballing.html\">Spitballing and Swamping<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 The topic&#8217;s gotten<a href=\"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4955\"> good coverage here at the NS<\/a>, but it&#8217;s worth noting that spitballing has a close connection to what John and I have been calling the <a href=\"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=2624\">iron man<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 (An earlier post about the connection<a href=\"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5171\"> here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>The connection is that with spitballing, a speaker makes a number of statements, mostly controversial, usually vague, and always memorable, and waits for people to react.\u00c2\u00a0 When they respond critically, one strategy is for the spitballer to then say that they&#8217;ve interpreted the statement incorrectly &#8212; <em>that&#8217;s not what I said!<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 And then follow up with more stuff, or rely on allies to craft interpretations of the statement that are more plausible.\u00c2\u00a0 Hence, spitball and rely on iron-manners in the background.<\/p>\n<p>Swamping is still a concept in the works.\u00c2\u00a0 One version of it is that it is the use of spitballs to completely fill the space of discussion with matters that are pure distraction.\u00c2\u00a0 And so, for example, one may be enraged with the tweets from an orange monster and the consequent iron-manning the monster&#8217;s minions pursue in light of criticism, but this distracts us from the policy decisions the orange monster&#8217;s other minions are making at the EPA or in the Department of Energy.\u00c2\u00a0 Moreover, it makes it impossible to have any discussion that is not about the spitballer.\u00c2\u00a0 The crucial thing about swamping, then, is that <em>we <\/em>are in a way complicit with the strategy, because it&#8217;s we who go along with the outrage and drama of spitball consequences.\u00c2\u00a0 We, as it were, pull the wool over our own eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new episode at Philosophy15 is up, and in it Talisse and I talk through the related phenomena of what we&#8217;d been calling in our old 3QD piece, Spitballing and Swamping.\u00c2\u00a0 The topic&#8217;s gotten good coverage here at the NS, but it&#8217;s worth noting that spitballing has a close connection to what John and I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5184\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Philosophy15 on Swamping and Spitballing<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,1214],"tags":[1180,1126,1625,2057,2153],"class_list":["post-5184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-iron-man-straw-man","tag-iron-man","tag-iron-man-fallacy","tag-ironmanning","tag-spitballing","tag-swamping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5185,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184\/revisions\/5185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}